Book review

Footage fetishists

Futuristic novelist William Gibson splices an engrossing tale of metaphysics and mystery from Internet film snippets.

By COLETTE BANCROFT, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 20, 2003

William Gibson is back from the future. Or maybe he just caught up with it.

Gibson, credited with inventing the term "cyberspace" and called the godfather of the '90s rage for cyberpunk fiction, set his previous six novels in a sleek, dark future world where jacking into the Web was an act of physical transformation and so many sinister forces were at play that being paranoid was simply realistic.

His new novel, Pattern Recognition, is set in the present, or something like it. It's a world still reeling from the Sept. 11 attacks, where "Google" is a verb and Russian gangsters and corporate CEOs are impossible to tell apart.

Gibson's protagonist is Cayce Pollard (her first name pronounced like Case, the antihero of Gibson's breakthrough novel Neuromancer). She may live in the same time frame we do, but she inhabits a different world. Cayce works as a coolhunter, a freelance divining rod for that ultimate and most elusive of marketable commodities: style.

Here's her job description: "No customers, no cool. It's about a group behavior pattern around a particular class of object. What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does."

"And then?"

"I point a commodifier at it."

"And?"

"It gets productized. Turned into units. Marketed."

Cayce has no idea how she does what she does, but she has such a reputation for infallibility that one "no" from her can doom an extremely expensive new logo design -- and infuriate a dangerous rival.

The downside is her severe allergy to overt displays of trademarks; an encounter with a flurry of Burberry plaid or Tommy Hilfiger "simulacra of simulacra" can strike her ill.

Perhaps her coolhunting gift is hereditary, somehow: Her father was a high-powered security expert who went missing in New York the day the towers fell, and her mother lives in a community devoted to electronic voice phenomena, which involves scrutinizing audiotape for the voices of the dead.

What all three do might be classified as what Cayce's father calls "apophenia . . . the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things."

Whatever the root of Cayce's apophenia, it keeps her globe-trotting as a consultant to corporations. It's a loner's vocation that suits her perfectly; her most intense personal relationships are conducted via e-mail.

Most of those revolve around a mysterious phenomenon called the footage. Snippets of strangely compelling film, apparently parts of a movie, appear inscrutably all over the Internet. No one knows who made the movie, why it's being distributed this way or what its plot or setting may be. No one is sure whether it's real film or computer-generated. But footageheads around the planet live for the next download of revelation.

A man walks across a rooftop; a pair of lovers kiss. There are 135 fragments, each one "endlessly collated, broken down, reassembled, by whole armies of the most fanatical investigators . . . Zaprudered into surreal dimensions of purest speculation, ghost-narratives have emerged and taken on shadowy but determined lives of their own."

Cayce's private enchantment with the numinous footage suddenly intersects with her job when she consults for Blue Ant, an international ad agency run by the comically named but scary Hubertus Bigend, "a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins' blood and truffled chocolates."

Bigend wants to find the source of the footage. So does Cayce, although their motivations are very different. From London to Tokyo to Moscow, Cayce puts her pattern-recognition skills to the test.

A pair of dealers in antique calculators and computers (there's a notion) met by chance on a London street lead her to a booze-sodden former intelligence agent who provides one piece of the puzzle. Her footage forum e-mail pals Parkaboy and Musashi invent a sexy virtual schoolgirl to wheedle information out of a Japanese footagehead, and then, oddly, the girl comes to life and runs off. A map that shares its unusual shape with the triggering mechanism of a Claymore mine may be the key to it all.

Pattern Recognition focuses less on the blurring of lines between humanity and technology that informs Gibson's earlier novels and more on the obsession with meaning that haunts many of the writers who influence his style, from Raymond Chandler to Thomas Pynchon. Like Chandler's detective and Pynchon's paranoids, Cayce can never be sure whether she's pursuing a pattern or imposing one.

In Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive and other earlier novels, Gibson created a future so seductive and dread-inducing, it can make a reader shiver. The present of Pattern Recognition isn't as darkly thrilling, but that future lurks around its edges.

With Gibson in fine form, his prose streaming from lyrical to creepy to mordantly witty, going coolhunting with Cayce is a smooth move to the present tense.

Pattern Recognition, $25.95, 356 pages, is published by G.P. Putnam's Sons.

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